Loeb heads Citroen 1-2 at end of opening leg in Mexico

“Perhaps I pushed a little too much this morning, but sometimes once you make a mistake you try to recover the time lost and then make more errors. My aim is to get onto the podium and although we probably need those ahead to make a mistake to achieve that, I will continue to attack and see if we can put pressure on them,” Solberg commented.

M-Sport Ford WRT duo Ott Tanak and Evgeny Novikov are next up in sixth and seventh, the former slipping behind Petter last night when he purposely picked up a 10 second penalty to give the Norwegian a better road position for day 2. Tanak now trails the 2003 World Rally Champion by 1.3 seconds. Novikov is a further 25.3 seconds adrift.

“This afternoon was okay. We had no dramas,” Tanak said, making no mention of the penalty. “The conditions weren't too bad and there were far fewer rocks out there than there had been this morning. The surface is quite hard so it wasn't too bad. In some places it's really clean and you have quite good grip, but in others it was still a bit dusty and slippery which is what makes it a bit tricky. I think for tomorrow we will just stick with pretty much the same set-up as we have now. We'll try to keep the pace and stay in front of Evgeny [Novikov]. It's all good experience for me.”

Further back, Chris Atkinson has had a pretty good start to his first WRC event since 2009. The Aussie lies in seventh in his Monster WRT-run Ford Fiesta RS WRC car, 31.7 seconds off P6. He set top ten times in every single stage and was even quickest in SS12, the second-run through the 2.21 km Super Special. Despite that though, he wasn't happy with his pace.

“We had no problems all afternoon but we're still not where we need to be,” he said. “We tried to push a bit harder this afternoon but the times didn't really come so we'll try some different set-ups in service and hopefully tomorrow we can go a lot faster.”

Of the rest, Nasser Al-Attiyah and Armindo Araujo round out the top ten, ahead of Sebastien Ogier, PWRC class leader, Benito Guerra, Ricardo Trivino, Michal Kosciuszko and Ken Block in positions 11 through to 15.

In terms of retirements, Thierry Neuville was the biggest scalp on day one. He had been running fourth in his Citroen Junior WRT-run DS3 WRC car, until he took a wheel off in SS6. He is expected to re-start under the Rally 2 rules on Saturday, along with WRC MINI Team Portugal man Paulo Nobre. Nobre rolled in SS5.

The action now continues on Saturday with drivers facing a massive 183.30km of action during more than 13 hours behind the wheel. It is based closer to Leon and includes two passes over the daunting 41.88km Otates test. Competitors restart at 06.00 local time and tackle two identical loops of two stages, before a final section which includes another test at Leon's race circuit. They return to the city for the overnight halt at 19.23 local time after seven more stages.

Start
the conversation - Add your comment

Although the administrators and moderators of this website will attempt to keep all objectionable comments off these pages, it is impossible for us to review all messages. All messages express the views of the poster, and neither Crash Media Group nor Crash.Net will be held responsible for the content of any message. We do not vouch for or warrant the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any message, and are not responsible for the contents of any message. If you find a message objectionable, please contact us and inform us of the problem or use the [report] function next to the offending post. Any message that does not conform with the policy of this service can be edited or removed with immediate effect.